LoveHateTragedy: The Story

If the label fits, trash it.

With their new album, Papa Roach makes it plain that no pigeonhole is big enough to contain them. lovehatetragedy (set for release June 18, 2002, on DreamWorks Records) heralds the refining and refocusing of their sound as they shed some of their identification with rock-rap fusion and strip down to a purer, but equally high-impact rock attack.

Frontman Jacoby Shaddix's decision to drop his longtime stage name reflects P-Roach's reaffirmation of their rock roots. "I know I'm gonna get asked about this a million times, so here's the story," he volunteers. "Jacoby Shaddix is actually my real name, so I figure I'll just rock it. But don't freak out - you can still call me Coby."

Following the release of their major-label debut, Infest, on April 25, 2000, Shaddix, guitarist Jerry Horton, bassist Tobin Esperance and drummer David Buckner blitzed the concert world with one all-out onslaught after another. P-Roach began this assault with a string of packed club appearances, then hit the road with the Vans Warped Tour. They picked up further momentum on tours at home and abroad with Korn, Eminem, Limp Bizkit and other major players before returning to headline large venues.

Audiences swelled as sales of Infest skyrocketed - the album is currently certified triple platinum. But with only a few random weeks off the road in a period spanning several years (P-Roach has essentially been touring since they began playing together as teenagers in Vacaville, Calif., nine years ago), tensions inside the band were running high as they hooked up with Ozzfest in the summer of 2001.

"We were ready to break each other's necks," Horton admits. "I really love the guys, but you need to get away every now and then, and we never had the time to do that." In fact, two years of nearly nonstop touring had pushed the entire band toward a critical restlessness.

The best remedy for this turned out to be hard work. "There really wasn't much for us to do at Ozzfest during the day," says Esperance. "Drinking and smoking weed was beginning to get old, so I started putting my time to good use by getting ideas for the next record down on tape."

Thus the foundations of lovehatetragedy were laid in the back of a bus at Ozzfest. There, after roaring through their set, Esperance, Horton and Buckner would retire to jam out new songs. Before long, they had assembled about an hour's worth of material and it quickly became clear that many of these songs diverged stylistically from the band's previous work. "All we knew was that we didn't want to make a carbon copy of Infest," Buckner illuminates. Shaddix divulges: "We had a saying: 'Underneath it all, we are a rock band.' Hip-hop and metal were two huge influences on our band, but being dubbed 'rap-metal heroes' put too many limits on us." Buckner continues: "We also knew we wanted everything to sound organic so we could do all the songs live without someone hiding behind the stage playing along." The new compositions covered an expansive range, from primal, punk-inflected catharses - a cover of The Pixies' "Gouge Away" (along with the original "Never Said It") appears on the initial pressing of lovehatetragedy - to sophisticated pastiches bordering on progressive rock.

When these fresh tracks were run by Shaddix for his creative input, the only thing his bandmates could be sure of was that he'd deliver something surprising even to them. Says Horton: "The funny thing about Jacoby is, he doesn't always make total sense in real life. I've read interviews he's done and thought, 'What in hell is he talking about?' But when he's writing songs, he puts everything together in a way that makes the most sense. And on a personal level, he always brings me closer into the music."

For lovehatetragedy, Shaddix conjured a kaleidoscope of lyrical conceits, stretching himself from subtle metaphors ("Singular Indestructible Droid" - in band shorthand, "SID") to the brutally honest meditations that have bonded him to so many listeners wrestling with the same uncertainties ("Decompression Period"). In each case his outpourings were completely unpremeditated, more stream-of-conscious than crafted.

"I'll write stuff and sometimes its meaning will change over the life of the song," he says. "Or, like, with 'Life Is A Bullet,' I'll start thinking about all the things I love in my life and all the things I fuckin' hate. I'll write a lyric like, 'I'm in love with too many things, and I hate everything.' It's love and hate, the yin and the yang, all the time. And then there's tragedy. Those three things - love, hate and tragedy - are a huge part of everybody's life. People fall in love every day; people fall out of love every day. Both can turn into tragedy. That's really what this record is about."

Papa Roach's enthusiasm for their new songs soared when Brendan O'Brien (Korn, Rage Against The Machine, Stone Temple Pilots, Pearl Jam) agreed to oversee lovehatetragedy. The producer had played a major role in some of their favorite albums, and it was quickly discovered that his method proved the ideal complement to the band's studio efforts. "Brendan is all about 'big rock,' with huge, raw tones," Shaddix says. "He's not the kind of person who uses synthesizers. With him, it's more like, you plug into an amp, you get a good sound and then you move on. That was perfect because we didn't want somebody to come in and totally flip around what we were doing."

In some instances, O'Brien simply advised them to lower a song by half a key. For Shaddix, the result of that was a revelation: Rather than push above his range, he delivers each song exactly where his voice needs to be. This approach dovetailed with his move away from rapping and back toward more melody-based vocals. "I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it," he confides. "Rapping all the time made me feel one-dimensional; singing gives me the opportunity to take the song through this whole emotional range and really get the message across."

It also sets the stage for the greatest possible drama when Shaddix hits the one real rap on lovehatetragedy, which explodes midway through first radio track "She Loves Me Not," a painful commentary on his admittedly volatile but deeply loving relationship with his wife, Kelly. "That's why 'She Loves Me Not' comes later in the record," he explains. "It comes out of nowhere and goes bam!"

lovehatetragedy may well be the edgiest Papa Roach album to date, the band's of-the-moment musical promise to rock as hard as they can. It's also a challenge to those who would bind them to their past work and leave no room for progress. Concludes Buckner: "All this record does is add to the evolving story of Papa Roach. The cover is a baby with headphones on, and the headphones are plugged into a guitar. It's symbolic of having an open mind, so when you listen to the record, try and get into that baby's head and just feel the rock."



:: LOVEHATETRAGEDY :: ABOUT THE SONGS ::

The members of Papa Roach recently discussed the tracks on their new album, lovehatetragedy (DreamWorks Records). Set for release June 18, 2002, the disc was produced by Brendan O'Brien (Korn, Pearl Jam, Rage Against The Machine, Stone Temple Pilots).

:: M-80 (Explosive Energy Movement)

Shaddix: "M-80" is about letting you see the best and worst sides of me. The chorus is: "I'm strong and fearless only 'cuz I rock and roll" - that says it. It's just straight fuckin' rock style, with a little more punk energy in there. We wanted to break right out of the gate with a hard, aggressive, edgy sound.

:: Life Is A Bullet

Shaddix: This one's about losing your mind, feeling that your head is in the clouds and you're disconnected from the world. But it's also about being ready when you're thrown into life - you'd better be ready to live fast, right now. Sometimes your gut instinct, what you come up with first, is what's right. I wrote the second verse in just one spurt of a thought. It was cool, because I went back and these words fit perfectly right over the vibe of the song. Instead of going, "Okay, let's try it 10 different ways," [producer] Brendan [O'Brien] was like, "That sounds good how it is; you guys don't need to change it."

:: Time And Time Again

Shaddix: This is, like, "Yeah, I did it, and I'll do it again. I'm an asshole, but you know what? I'm gonna be an asshole again in the future." That's me with my lady. Then the chorus flips to: "Time and time again, you think about yourself before you think about me." That's my lady talkin' to me, so everything flips - the mood of the song, the beat, everything. Buckner: I was going for something unusual on this one. When we got into pre-production, as soon as Coby started putting weird stuff over it, I was, like, "I need to jazz it up." What I was doing had become a little bit boring, so I went for some [early] Phil Collins shit. We experimented with a bunch of different beats, but that's the one that felt right.

:: Walking Thru Barbed Wire

Shaddix: This song is about my dog that died. I came home and he was dead on my bed. It was really shocking. That dog was my total companion. I tell you, man, I flipped. Human beings are our friends, but a dog gives you that unconditional kind of love. In a weird way, it's that same kind of love with my kid. My dog was my family, too.

:: Decompression Period

Shaddix: This is, like, I've just come off the road and I need time to collect my thoughts. You're going from 100 miles an hour to slammin' on your brakes and sitting still. That's my life. But I live every day just like I want to; I do it my way. Just like Frank Sinatra - me and Frank, O.G. fuckin' rockers.

Horton: When I heard Coby sing the words to "Decompression Period" I started choking up, because he was so putting his heart and soul into it. He's just exposing himself for everything he is. I admire him for that. It's a hard thing to do, but I know it helps him get through some of the things he's got going on.

Buckner: When we were working with Brendan on "Decompression Period," I was, like, "What am I going to do to achieve this sound in a live situation?" And he said, "Don't worry about that right now. You're just going to make the best record you can make, and you'll figure it out - it'll work itself out." And he was right.

:: Born With Nothing, Die With Everything

Shaddix: You're born with nothing - you rely totally on somebody else to take care of you, feed you, change your diaper. Then you grow up in a world where people have this instinct to achieve goals and be successful on their own. This is about pushing yourself and living your life as you want to live it while you're here. Also, it's me against the world: "Fed up, tired, sick and twisted/ One-man army, I'm enlisted."

:: She Loves Me Not

Shaddix: This is about my relationship with my lady, trying to hold that together. It's been twisted and trying in the last few years, and I put my heart on the line about that here. This is the only song on the record where there's a rap, but it's disguised in more of an R&B kind of thing. It was just rhythm and meter and the right timbre and intensity, and it came across really cool.

:: Singular Indestructible Droid

Shaddix: This is about a conversation that me and my friend Sid Wilson, the DJ from Slipknot, had. It's, like, "Okay, I'm sick of this skin; I'm sick of this body. I want to trade it in. I want to be a different person. I want to move on to the next life." Then the chorus is: "Biological, spiritual, electrical, digital." The biological is the body, and the spiritual is our soul. What the soul is to our body is what the digital is to the electrical - it's the zeroes and ones. If you meld them perfectly together, biological/spiritual and electrical/digital, you'll have this singular indestructible droid. This person gave up his soul to live forever, but to live forever in a physical instead of a spiritual being. The song is also about man's use of the electrical/digital to his advantage or his destruction. It's the clash of the two.

Buckner: We asked my uncle [John Olmedo] and his [Indian vocal] group to come into the studio. They sat around the drum, did the chanting and the singing, and we just turned on the mic and recorded them. The next day I was listening to the playback. The song we were working on was "SID." I was listening to the Indian chant, and the tempo totally matched up with "SID." It also felt right thematically: The chant was written by a member of the group. He was having a child, and the song was written to welcome this new life into the world. So when we put it with "SID" - where you hear Coby singing, 'Blood of my blood, skin of my skin' - in this weird way, it matches up with the meaning of this Indian chant.

:: Black Clouds

Shaddix: That's about confronting your demons. It's one thing to know you have a problem - that's the first thing. The next thing is dealing with it, confronting it and coming to terms with whatever it is. I wrote "Black Clouds" in the darkest, most depressed state I've ever been in in my whole life. In the original lyrics I was talking straight suicide. But I changed that because I came out of it and I was feeling better.

Esperance: We can all connect with what Coby's saying here because he wrote a lot about things all four of us went through in the process of being on tour - traveling, being a band, being brothers. "Black Clouds" started out during Ozzfest. I just sat down at the back of the bus, started the song, and stayed there until I finished the whole thing. All these ideas came about putting strings on it, so when we recorded it, we had an orchestra come in. They played the song, then we cut up what they'd done and put it into really cool parts. We also used 12-string acoustic guitars and this real rhythmic, galloping bass line and drum beat. It was a creative challenge for us, but we got to watch it grow into something and say, "Wow, we've never done anything like this before." It's a different kind of song - it reminds me of a rock opera.

:: Code Of Energy

Shaddix: This is about me being in a band and wondering what everybody's perspective is on me. There are a lot of things about me people don't know. You might be surprised at how I am as a person, apart from the band. I'm a really nice, loving, generous person - and I'm a fuckin' lunatic asshole at the same time. So with this one I'm letting people know they might be surprised if they knew me, but I'm not letting them all the way in. You can't get all the way inside of me.

Buckner: This record crosses the sonic spectrum: Some songs have a lot of production, and others, like "Code Of Energy," are really raw.

:: lovehatetragedy

Shaddix: Throughout the record, there's this theme of love, hate and tragedy. "lovehatetragedy" says, "Human behavior, peculiar it seems," and if you think about the complexity of the human race - the different cultures, religions, beliefs, desires - it's just crazy. It's something that will perplex me forever. September 11th made me think about life in a different perspective. The song also says, "Tragedy strikes when you least expect it." That's so true, so you might as well live every day as if it's your last. I don't mean live fast, die young, fuck life; it's more, like, this could all be over at any time. Enjoy it and live it and love it while you got it.